Uniquely identifying a mobile electronic device

ABSTRACT

The Internet is becoming an essential part of our lives. This trend is even stronger with the rise of cell phones having Internet access that almost the entire population carries with them at all times. Security is a huge problem on the Internet, however, and new authentication methods are needed specifically for cell phones. Presented here is a method of identifying a mobile electronic device by its configuration settings, potentially including contact list information. This invention, in particular, fills a crucial need to secure access to the Internet from mobile phones.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This patent application claims the benefit of the filing date from Provisional Patent No. 61/324,312 filed Apr. 15, 2010, entitled “Uniquely Identifying a Mobile Electronic Device.”

STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH OR DEVELOPMENT

Not Applicable

REFERENCE TO SEQUENCE LISTING, A TABLE, OR A COMPUTER PROGRAM LISTING COMPACT DISC APPENDIX

Not Applicable

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

1. Field of Invention

The present invention relates to a method of watermarking mobile devices using their configuration settings so that remote systems trust interacting with them more.

2. Prior Art

The Internet is becoming an essential part of our everyday lives. People use the Internet to conduct commerce, communicate with friends, read the news, watch movies, get directions, etc. etc. This trend is intensifying even more with the rise of mobile phones. Mobile phones are owned by more than 90% of the US population. Even third world countries, which are currently too poor for mass adoption of personal computers, have impressive mobile phone adoption. Concurrently, the technical sophistication of mobile phones has advanced dramatically. Almost every new mobile phone has a built-in capability of accessing the Internet. These three amazing trends—the rise of the Internet, the rise of the mobile phone, and the technical advancement of the mobile phone—imply that soon, most people on the planet will have access to the Internet at any time and any place.

But there is a potential downside to this. While the Internet allows access to all sorts of useful information, if proper security is not in place, the Internet can allow other people to access your personal information fraudulently. In an extreme example, this personal information might be used to access your bank account. Of course, Internet security is not a new problem, in fact username/password authentication has been around for decades. However, now that the Internet contains so much sensitive personal information for so many people, username/password authentication is now seen as insufficient protection. Biometric technologies, such as fingerprint and iris recognition, have begun being used to authenticate users. IP address detection is sometimes used as a factor in authentication. All of these technologies, however, were not designed with mobile devices in mind. For example, an author of this patent recently used an IP “geo-location” service when connecting to the Internet through his phone. This service gave an address 200 miles away from where he actually was.

A new identification mechanism is needed for mobile devices, so that they can be authenticated and trusted by third parties.

Existing methods of identifying a mobile device include the following examples for mobile phones specifically. First, a phone may be identified by its International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number. An IMEI number is given to every phone using most of the newest cell networks (e.g. GSM, WCDMA, and iDEN). See Wikipedia's “International Mobile Equipment Identity” entry for more. However, accessing the IMEI number of a phone is typically not allowed in applications approved by the maker of a smart phone (e.g. an Apple iPhone application from the Apple iPhone App Store).

The Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card number is another way of identifying a mobile phone. This number is usually only accessible by the cell network operator and the hardware layer of the phone. The reason for this is because if this number were leaked, someone could make fraudulent phone calls with the number, and that would lead to all sorts of problem for the phone company.

Apple iPhones and Research in Motion Blackberry's, in particular, are also given supposedly unique identification numbers. For Apple iPhones, the code to get the unique identification number is “[[UIDevice currentDevice] uniqueIdentifier]”. See the entry for “UIDevice” in the Apple IPhone Developer's online documentation for details.

All of these unique numbers associated with phones are 1) easy to forge and 2) persistent even if the phone changes ownership. They do not establish a link between the user of a phone and the phone itself.

Patent application Ser. No. 10/280,732 by James Uberti describes a mechanism to uniquely identify a person in a financial transaction based on a combination of their biometrics. This invention identifies a person, but does not foresee how to identify a mobile device. Plus, the biometrics presented in this application are neither novel nor particularly relevant to a mobile device.

U.S. Pat. No. 6,987,948 by G. Eric Engstrom et al. considers customizations users may make to their mobile devices, but it does not envision how these customizations can be used to uniquely identify those mobile devices.

U.S. Pat. No. 6,928,278 by Satoshi Shimomura describes the concept of a “total personal password” which includes only the name, address, date of birth, and phone number of a mobile phone user. This type of information is stored all over the Internet—not just on a mobile phone. And information that is typically stored only on mobile phones, such as contact lists and mobile phone settings, is not considered. As such, this patent does not think to utilize the unique advantages of the mobile device environment. Also, this patent does not consider the larger context of uniquely identify a mobile device. Instead, it focuses on games and examinations.

U.S. Pat. No. 6,862,610 by Gary Stephen Shuster describes an identification mechanism using many personal questions. This patent is focused on minimizing the number of personal questions that need to be answered so that user privacy is maximized. But that is a completely orthogonal topic compared to discussion of what personal questions could help uniquely identify a person or device. And this patent is silent about identification of mobile devices specifically.

“iPhone Privacy” by Nicolas Seriot, published for the Black Hat DC 2010 conference, lists many unique identifiers that applications installed on an iPhone are able to gather. But this paper suggests that it would be bad for applications to do this, since getting these identifiers might put user privacy in jeopardy. This paper does not recognize that these same unique identifiers can help legitimate applications prove the identify a mobile device to a third party.

Background of the Invention Objects and Advantages

Accordingly, the advantage of our invention is that it uses a mobile device's configuration settings to uniquely identify it. Mobile devices typically contain tons of configuration settings, and mobile phones in particular have contact lists (which represent a lot of information), so each mobile device will be found to be very different from every other.

BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention collects a multitude of configuration settings of a mobile device, does processing on this data, sends the processed data to a third party, and the third party compares the received data with data received earlier. In a preferred embodiment, the mobile device is a cell phone, and the configuration data includes address book information.

DRAWINGS

Not Applicable

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

We begin by making some definitions. A “mobile electronic device,” or, more casually, a “mobile device,” is any device with at least some of the power of a computer which is small enough to be reasonable moved around. This invention is only concerned with mobile devices that can connect to a network of other computers (e.g. the Internet, an Intranet, or a phone company's network). A mobile device need not be carried by a human. A mobile device need not be a phone. An Apple iPad is one example of a mobile device that is not a phone.

“Contact list information” is information stored on a mobile device that allows an operator of a mobile device to easily connect to another person, phone, or mobile device. A phone's address book is one, but not the only, example of contact list information.

“Configuration settings” of a mobile device include parameters an operator of that device has freedom to set in their phone. One example of a configuration setting is contact list information. If the mobile device is a phone, more examples of configuration settings are which wallpaper image users see as background to phone menu items, alarm clock settings, how menu items are arranged in the phone's user interface, shortcuts that are set (for example, pressing the left arrow key at a home screen might be programmed to directly open the recent call list), ring tone or vibration settings, which applications are installed, your keyboard cache (containing frequently typed words), etc.

The invention proceeds by first having an application running on the mobile device collect certain configuration settings. Processing may occur to encrypt, sanitize, and/or summarize this information. The result of this is sent to a third party that is reachable via the computer network the mobile device has access to. Now the third party has baseline data. Later, when the mobile device or an operator of the mobile device attempts to connect to that third party again, the same or similar data is collected again and is run through the same or a similar processing step. The result is sent to the third party again. The third party compares the data the mobile device just sent with the data the mobile device sent previously. In a preferred embodiment, this similarity calculation may be the edit distance between the earlier configuration settings and the later configuration settings. See Wikipedia's “Edit distance” entry for examples. The third party takes action based on the result of this similarity calculation.

This invention is useful for two crucial reasons. First is that configuration settings are unlikely to change dramatically from one interaction with the third party to the next. This is especially true compared with naïve indicators, such as the mobile device's location or IP address. A mobile device by definition may move around too much to make identification based on its location valuable. Also, mobile phones in particular use complicated methods to connect to the Internet, and their IP addresses are usually a poor identifier to the phone itself. The second crucial benefit of this invention is that a third party might hold sensitive personal information (e.g. banking information). The third party can use this invention to make sure sensitive personal information is only accessed from mobile devices that are known to be owned by a person who is allowed to access that personal information. This invention may be particularly useful in combination with other authentication techniques. For example, maybe a user is asked to scan their fingerprint or iris once a day to verify they are in possession of their mobile device. This is time consuming and cumbersome for the user, but it may be highly accurate and may prove the mobile device has not been lost or stolen. Then, if the user wishes to access the third party throughout the day, the mobile device is authenticated potentially automatically (without the user needing to take any action) by the present invention.

Conclusions, Ramifications, and Scope

The invention presented here is one of the best ways of uniquely identifying, and hence authenticating, a mobile device. This invention can be highly accurate, since there may be tons of configuration settings that different devices have set differently. This invention can occur without any user interaction. This invention can be used alongside other authentication or identification mechanisms—it is common practice in the security industry to combine authentication mechanisms. And, even though much of this disclosure discussed preventing unauthorized access to online data, the present invention is equally helpful in preventing any unauthorized activity online (other examples include changing data or taking an action).

Many of the examples given in the Specification were for mobile phones, but as said many times, there are many non-phone mobile devices such as personal digital assistants and hand-held computers. The present invention includes identification of those devices as well.

The “third party” mentioned many times may be one server, many servers working together, or something else.

While the foregoing written description of the invention enables one of ordinary skill to make and use what is considered presently to be the best mode thereof, those of ordinary skill will understand and appreciate the existence of variations, combinations, and equivalents of the specific embodiment, method, and examples herein. The invention should therefore not be limited by the above described embodiment, method, and examples, but by all embodiments and methods within the scope and spirit of the invention as claimed. 

We claim:
 1. A method of identifying mobile electronic devices, comprising: a. collecting a first plurality of configuration settings of a first mobile electronic device, b. optionally summarizing, simplifying, and/or encoding the data of part a, c. transmitting the result of part b to a third party, d. collecting a second plurality of configuration settings of a second mobile electronic device which may or not be the same as said first mobile electronic device, e. performing the same operation of part b on the data of part d, f. transmitting the result of part e to said third party, g. said third party calculating how similar the data received in part c is to the data received in part f, and h. if, in part g, said third party determines said data received in part c is more than a threshold similar to said data received in part f, then determining that said first mobile electronic device is likely the same as said second mobile electronic device.
 2. The method of 1 wherein said first mobile electronic device and said second mobile electronic device are the same.
 3. The method of 1 wherein at least one of said first mobile electronic device and said second mobile electronic device is a mobile phone.
 4. The method of 1 wherein said first plurality of configuration settings and said second plurality of configuration settings are the same.
 5. The method of 1 wherein said third party is not merely one entity but a consortium of entities working together.
 6. The method of 1 wherein the configuration settings in parts a and d include contact list information.
 7. The method of 1 wherein the processing steps of parts b and e include encrypting the data of parts a and d respectively.
 8. The method of 1 wherein the processing steps of parts b and e include compressing the data of parts a and d respectively.
 9. The method of 1 wherein the processing steps of parts b and e include summarizing the data of parts a and d respectively.
 10. The method of 1 further comprising identifying said mobile electronic device by additional means.
 11. The method of 1 further comprising identifying an operator of said mobile electronic device by additional means.
 12. The method of 1 further comprising asking an operator of said mobile electronic device for additional personal information in the event the result of part g indicates little similarity.
 13. The method of 12 wherein said additional personal information includes a username and password.
 14. The method of 12 wherein said additional personal information includes a user's biometric.
 15. A method of identifying mobile electronic devices, comprising: a. collecting a plurality of configuration settings of a first mobile electronic device, b. optionally summarizing, simplifying, and/or encoding the data of part a, c. transmitting the result of part b to a third party, d. said third party calculating how similar the data received in part c is to data from a second mobile electronic device received earlier by said third party in this mechanism, and e. if, in part d, said third party determines said data received in part c is more than a threshold similar to said data received earlier, then determining that said first mobile electronic device is the likely the same as said second mobile electronic device.
 16. The method of 15 wherein said mobile electronic device is a mobile phone.
 17. The method of 15 wherein said third party is not merely one entity but a consortium of entities working together.
 18. The method of 15 wherein the configuration settings of part a include contact list information.
 19. The method of 15 wherein the processing step of part b includes encrypting the data of part a.
 20. The method of 15 wherein the processing step of part b includes compressing the data of part a.
 21. The method of 15 wherein the processing step of part b includes summarizing the data of part a.
 22. The method of 15 further comprising identifying said mobile electronic device by additional means.
 23. The method of 15 further comprising identifying an operator of said mobile electronic device by additional means.
 24. The method of 15 further comprising asking an operator of said mobile electronic device for additional personal information in the event the result of part d indicates little similarity.
 25. The method of 24 wherein said additional personal information includes a username and password.
 26. The method of 24 wherein said additional personal information includes a user's biometric. 